Ed Snyder began this blog in order to share his decade-long experience with all things cemeterial. As a photographer specializing in images of cemetery statuary, I've run into some interesting people, had some unexplainable experiences, and had a lot of fun.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Mother’s Day and its Founder – Anna Jarvis

I recently photographed Anna Jarvis’ (1864 - 1948) grave
marker in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, in Bala Cynwyd, PA (a suburb of Philadelphia). Jarvis is the mother, the founder, of Mother’s Day in the United States. I wondered if people left Hallmark cards
and boxes of Whitman’s chocolates at her grave every Mothers’ Day (the second Sunday in May, here in the U.S.). Turns out that such a deed would be a great insult to the
woman!Keep reading to find out why.

Mother's Day, according to Wikipedia, is “a modern
celebration honoring one's own mother, as well as motherhood, maternal bonds,
and the influence of mothers in society. The American holiday of Mother's Day
was first celebrated in 1908, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her own mother
in Grafton, West Virginia."

Her campaign to make Mother's Day a recognized
holiday in the United States began in 1905, the year her own mother, Ann Jarvis, died. "Anna’s mission was to honor her mother by continuing
work she started and to set aside a day to honor mothers…, 'the person who
has done more for you than anyone in the world.' Anna's mother, Ann
Jarvis, was a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of
the Civil War….” (ref).

Due to Jarvis’ campaigning, several states officially
recognized Mother's Day, the first in 1910 being Jarvis’ home state of West
Virginia. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation to institute Mother’s Day as a national holiday.

So, why would Jarvis be insulted to have FTD deliver flowers
to her grave on Mother’s Day? Or for folks to leave a Whitman’s Sampler and a
Mother’s Day card? Well, in 1923, just nine years after the first official Mother's
Day, commercialization of the holiday became so rampant that Jarvis herself “became
a major opponent of what the holiday had become and spent all her inheritance
and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration,” says Louisa Taylor in the 2008 Canwest News Service article"Mother's Day creator likely 'spinning in her grave'".

Jarvis' efforts did little good to thwart the commercialization as Mother's Day became (and continues to be) one of the most commercially
successful of all U.S. holidays. Who profits? Greeting card companies, flower delivery companies, and candy companies, to name a few.

"A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to
write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And
candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty
sentiment."

So how is it that Jarvis was born in West Virginia and is
buried outside Philadelphia? Anna Jarvis never married and had no children –
ironic, perhaps, for the founder of Mother’s Day. She spent her declining years
in West Chester, PA, where her sister lived. The grave marker in West Laurel
Hill Cemetery marks the family plot, in which Anna, along with her mother, sister,
and brother are buried.

To give you an idea of the size of the Jarvis monument here at West Laurel Hill Cemetery, above is a photo of my friend Robert Reinhardt photographing it. I must thank Robert for pointing it out to me last year. We were at the cemetery photographing the grave stones when he brought it to my attention. As many times as I have been to West Laurel Hill, I never knew of the existence of the Jarvis grave marker. Note also the "Daughters of the American Revolution" plaque at its base.